12 February 2009

The Arbesman limit

Samuel Arbesman talks how to get something named after yourself. Of course, he names something after himself -- the "Arbesman limit", which is the number of things that one person can have named after themselves. (Gauss, Euler, etc. provide a lower bound for this limit.)

Supposedly Banach originally named his spaces "spaces of type B" or something like that, figuring that people would see the B, assume it standed for Banach, and start calling them Banach spaces. If that's true, it worked.

Weierstrass, by contrast, who helped develop the foundation of analysis, has much less named after him. I believe he proved the theorem on expanding holomorphic functions locally in power series, but that theorem is not normally given a name. I can think of the Bolzano-Weierstrass theorem, the Weierstrass preparation theorem, and not much else.

Apparently Norbert Wiener claimed to have independently come up with the idea of Banach space, and tried to cement his claim by talking about Banach-Wiener spaces. It didn't catch on.

This suggests to me a rule of thumb: don't look like you're trying too hard to get something named after you. Maybe try instead to get a friend or two to do the naming for you, then sit back and bask in the glory.